If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Renewables to exceed half of German electricity use in 2023 ((AFP, Dec 18, 2023)
According to preliminary figures, Germans will consume a total of around 517 billion kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity this year, compared with 540 billion kWh in 2022.Some 52 percent of that will come from renewables, compared to 47 percent in 2022, the agency said.
You Know It’s a Placebo. So Why Does It Still Work? (Tom Vanderbilt, 12/19/23, Wired)
You might think that having a positive attitude about the nothing-pill is what transforms it into a something-pill. Perhaps OLPs are a sort of meta-placebo, a testament to how much we believe in our power of belief. But the real driving impulse for many patients who enroll in clinical trials isn’t positive expectation. It seems to be a more uncertain emotion: hope. As the 2017 study puts it, “Hope is a paradoxical combination of opposites, balancing despair and the counterfactual notion that things can improve—a kind of ‘tragic optimism.’” A patient who has suffered for years from some condition, taken drugs, undergone procedures, and gotten no relief may think: A sugar pill probably won’t help, but what the heck, let’s see what happens. As a 2016 paper in the journal Pain puts it, “Engendering hope when participants feel hopeless about their condition can be therapeutic.”
New York AG Ridicules Trump’s Failed Courtroom Hail Marys (Jose Pagliery, Dec. 18, 2023, Daily Beast)
“Unlike a fine Bordeaux, defendants’ case for a directed verdict does not improve with age,” AG special counsel Andrew Amer wrote in a court filing on Monday. […]
“The motion, as with many of the defendants’ courtroom antics and maneuvers during the course of this trial, is nothing more than a political stunt designed to provide Mr. Trump, his co-defendants, and their counsel with sound bites for press conferences, Truth Social posts, and cable news appearances,” Amer wrote.
But he also noted that those requests only got more ridiculous as time went on, because the evidence presented at trial only made it more clear—not less—that Trump routinely lied on personal financial statements to score bank loans and insurance policies. Justice Arthur F. Engoron shot down every attempt by the Trumps with increasingly exasperated shrugs ranging from “denied” to “absolutely denied.” And he’s expected to toss this one out too—perhaps for the last time.
In Monday’s cheeky, three-page filing, Amer noted that “additional evidence cannot possibly lead to a better outcome” for them.
US nuclear-fusion lab enters new era: achieving ‘ignition’ over and over (Jeff Tollefson, 12/17/23, Nature)
In December 2022, after more than a decade of effort and frustration, scientists at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) announced that they had set a world record by producing a fusion reaction that released more energy than it consumed — a phenomenon known as ignition. They have now proved that the feat was no accident by replicating it again and again, and the administration of US President Joe Biden is looking to build on this success by establishing a trio of US research centres to help advance the science.
The stadium-sized laser facility, housed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, has unequivocally achieved its goal of ignition in four out of its last six attempts, creating a reaction that generates pressures and temperatures greater than those that occur inside the Sun.
Japan cuts big deals with ASEAN — with one eye on Beijing (Matthew Kendrick, 12/17/23, GZero)
Tokyo committed to an implementation plan for over 130 projects with ASEAN, covering everything from the green economy transformation to cybersecurity to arms technology and equipment transfers.
The joint leaders statement also contained language regarding “respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity” and the “renunciation of the threat or use of force” — clear references to China’s activities in the South China Sea.
In a separate bilateral deal, Indonesia will get $63.7 million to bolster its maritime security and a Japanese-built patrol boat to boot.
Similarly, Malaysia will get $2.8 million for “warning and surveillance” gear as part of a Japanese program to bolster law enforcement and security in friendly countries.
The Philippines’ coast guard agreed to cooperate more closely with Japan’s. Manila also received advanced Japanese radars last month and is in talks with Tokyo over a formal military pact that could allow mutual troop deployments and training.
Also last month, Japan and Vietnam elevated their mutual relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership” and are discussing a potential military deal.
Free electric vehicle charging at work? It’s possible with optimum solar (SPX, Dec 18, 2023)
The global surge in electric vehicle sales has prompted an Australian university to explore how it could offer free or nominal EV charging facilities to staff and students by optimising its solar PV system and minimising workplace electricity costs.
Engineering researchers based at the University of South Australia (UniSA) Mawson Lakes campus say that using renewable energy to power EV day charging is the key, lowering electricity grid demand in the evening and helping to support Australia’s net zero emission targets by 2050.
Both The Wife and I have free charging at work, meaning we’ve very nearly never spent a cent to power our vehicle.
An Introduction to Vince Guaraldi, the Jazz Composer Who Created the Best Christmas Album Ever, A Charlie Brown Christmas (Open Culture, December 18th, 2023)
When A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired 58 years ago, few had any confidence that it would be a hit. Its story and animation, bare-bones even by the standards of mid-nineteen-sixties television, made a positive impression on neither CBS’ executives nor on many of the special’s own creators. They didn’t expect that this very simplicity would turn it into a perennial holiday favorite — nor, presumably, that its soundtrack by the Vince Guaraldi Trio would become one of the most beloved Christmas albums in existence. Now that we’re well into the season when the music from A Charlie Brown Christmas is heard every day in homes, cafés, and shopping malls all around the world, why not get an introduction to Guaraldi, the man and his music, from pop culture video essayist Matt Draper?
On Rescuing a “Dead Art Form” — A Landmark Book on Opera in Performance (Joe Horowitz, 8/26/2018, Arts Journal)
During the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, when classical music was a lot more robust than nowadays, High Fidelity was the American magazine of choice for lay connoisseurs and not a few professionals. Its opera expert, Conrad L. Osborne, stood apart. “C.L.O.” was self-evidently a polymath. His knowledge of singing was encyclopedic. He wrote about operas and their socio-cultural underpinnings with a comprehensive authority. As a prose stylist, he challenged comparisons to such quotable American music journalists as James Huneker and Virgil Thomson—yet was a more responsible, more sagacious adjudicator. In fact, his capacity to marry caustic dissidence with an inspiring capacity for empathy and high passion was a rare achievement.
Over the course of the 1980s, High Fidelity gradually disappeared, and so did C.L.O. He devoted his professional life to singing, acting and teaching. He also, in 1987, produced a prodigious comic novel, “O Paradiso,” dissecting the world of operatic performance from the inside out.Then, a year ago, he suddenly resurfaced as a blogger, at conradlosborne.com—a voice from the past. Incredibly, the seeming éminence grise of High Fidelity was revealed to have been a lad in his 30s. And now, in his 80s, he has produced his magnum opus, Opera as Opera: The State of the Art—788 large, densely printed pages, festooned with footnotes and endnotes. It is, without question, the most important book ever written in English about opera in performance. It is also a cri de coeur, documenting the devastation of a single precinct of Western high culture in modern and postmodern times.
Essentially, Tom Wolfe on opera.
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Interview: Why ‘Opera As Opera’ Author Conrad L. Osborne Asserts That Artform Is In Creative Decline (David Salazar, 12/23/18, OperaWire)
It all starts with the repertoire. Osborne posits that the main staples of the operatic canon start with the major works of Mozart and stretch through until the operas of Richard Strauss; he calls this the Extended 19th Century or “E-19 for short.” Osborne does note that many operas from before and after this period have become part of the repertoire, but in his view, these works are the ones that are part of the “renewable re-affirmability that sustain our operatic institutions.” Moreover, he notes that operas of this period showcase similarity of content in terms of the music, plot and themes they tell, even if there are marked differences of style throughout the period.In his view, there is a general “flight from E-19” with new operatic creators placing more emphasis on theory and philosophy with regard to how the artform is created, de-emphasizing the narrative roots that were at the core of major staples.
In musical terms, he points to the “atonalists and serialists, creating a whole new language that forbid diatonic melody and sought to express things in different way.”
The idea was taken up by the musical intellectuals, pedagogues, and institutions, leading to the idea that “simple, expressive melodies” were outdated for expressive purposes.
“And if you did [use melodies], then it had to be so harmonically disguised that the listener couldn’t pick up on it anyway,” he added.
“That’s a central problem as far as opera is concerned,” Osborne further opined. “The singing-actor is the center of the operatic experience and characters are expressed through their individual vocal achievements. If you don’t have melody to sing or take advantage of how the voice has been developed over 400 years or so of operatic history, you don’t have much of anything at the center of the form’s expressive possibilities.”
He noted that the result is opera getting built up of other things.
“Modernism is built up of materials and structure. The content is not the subject. The subject is the materials.”
He referenced the idea that in modern art, the subject of the painting is not what is being depicted, but the paint and canvas itself. In music, the harmonic structures, rhythm, and instrumental timbre are given preponderance over melody in modernism.
Utility rate roundup: Decreases for Eversource and Unitil, controversy for Liberty (HADLEY BARNDOLLAR, DECEMBER 18, 2023, NH Bulletin)
The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects natural gas prices to decline by 24 percent from last winter. In New England, natural gas is used to produce roughly half of the region’s electricity.
Last year’s exorbitant cost of energy was mainly attributed to the war in Ukraine, the region’s overreliance on natural gas, and extreme weather events, utilities have said.
Javier Milei and the Promise of a New Argentina (ALEJANDRO A. CHAFUEN, DECEMBER 15, 2023, Religion & Liberty)
Despite its name, derived from Argentum (silver), Argentina did not get rich owing to its mineral wealth. The country has little or no silver. Argentina began its road to prosperity only after General Justo José de Urquiza (1801–1870) defeated Juan Manuel de Rosas (1793–1877), the powerful governor of Buenos Aires, then and now the wealthiest province in the country, with the aid of Brazil and Uruguay. Urquiza became president in 1854 and adopted the Constitution inspired by the work of Juan Bautista Alberdi (1810–1884), a legal scholar and political theorist well-versed in economics. The 1853 Constitution created the legal framework that propelled Argentina’s economy.
Argentina endured ups and downs, but from the mid-19th century until the 1930s and ’40s, it experienced high economic growth. In fact, it overcame the Great Depression of 1930 faster than most other countries. However, the financial crisis of the 1930s created incentives for some of the world’s leading intellectual centers to explore new economic policies. Economists at the leading universities around the globe started devising various interventionist and statist schemes. The economic policies of the New Deal, Keynesianism, and fascist corporatism had a worldwide impact. Unfortunately, Argentina copied many of them. Its labor law was a copy of Mussolini’s Carta di Lavoro, for example. Although there have been periods of liberal economic policies during the past eight decades, the trend has continued toward increased interventionism, and the result has been dire poverty. Today, estimates from the Argentine Catholic University Center report that almost 45% of the population lives in poverty.